Irving Fisher of Yale

摘要

An overview of the career and contributions of Irving Fisher. Yale had difficulty in coming to terms with Irving Fisher during his lifetime. That phenomenon bears pondering. After all, Fisher was very much a son of Yale. All of his formal higher education—from his undergraduate years to the award of his Ph.D.—carried Yale's seal of approval. His Yale experience was crucial in shaping his professional trajectory. He was often to remark that his work in mathematical economics had been inspired by two Yale mentors: Willard Gibbs, the mathematical physicist, and William Graham Sumner, the political economist who was also the most outspoken Social Darwinist on the American scene. Fisher, it should also be noted, was based at Yale throughout his entire adult life. Only once did he seriously seek full-time employment outside New Haven. This occurred in 1906 when he lobbied hard, though unsuccessfully, to head the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. (Excluded here is his brief flirtation with running for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1934, an exercise that was quixotic from the start.)